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Rock and roll subjects have not exactly been excluded from the exploding popularity of indie comics over the last few decades, but they have not been a consistent point of reference either. Maybe the fact that you can’t hear a comic book is one factor. But with a band as universally popular as the Beatles, that would hardly seem to matter. As early as 1978, Marvel released a special edition “Story of the Beatles, overseen by Stan Lee. In the late 80s and early 90s, Rock N Roll Comics released a string of cartoon band bios, everyone from the Grateful Dead to AC/DC, but these have been criticized for being too skimpy and/or clichéd.

With the growing sophistication of the art-comic genre, it’s time to expect more. In 2014, German artist-writer Arne Bellstorf made a big move in the right direction with this 196-page graphic novelization of the Beatles’ early days as the house band at various Hamburg clubs. “Baby’s in Black” hones in on the romance between the group’s then-bassist Stu Sutcliffe and local photographer Astrid Kirchherr. She was part of the city’s bohemian art crowd (also included was her friend Klaus Voormann was another) that befriended the group. This was a natural angle for Bellstorf, who also hails from Hamburg.

Not only does romance sell, but this story has a tragic dénouement. As many baby-boomer rock fans already know, Sutcliffe left the band to devote more time to his primary passion (painting) while also getting engaged to Kirchherr. Then he died unexpectedly in April of 1962, likely due to a congenital brain condition that caused a fatal hemorrhage. The Beatles first hit record (“Love Me Do”) came out six months later.

So this early slice of pop history, played out in the rollicking red-light districts and quiet residential streets of Germany’s second largest city, has potentially a lot to offer on the developmental days of what would become rock and roll’s most famous band. But finding the right balance between these two main story elements is not always smooth going for Bellstorf.

His pencil and ink style is fetching and fairly naturalistic; it is especially good in his spatial reproductions of the infamous Reeperbahn with its elaborate signage and other landmarks, like Hamburg’s central train station. But his odd way with a human visage: black marble eyes, tiny mouths and limited expression, give the book an almost naïve look that can grow unsettling. This is accentuated by his habit of filling in backgrounds and clothing with what look to be gray crayon squiggles.

So yeah, I wanted to like “Baby’s in Black” a bit more than I did, though some of it may not be due to Bellstorf. The rather flat dialogue may have been partially caused by the English translation and I guess one can only surmise so much about what these folks were actually saying back then, especially considering that some of them (Kirchherr, Voorman and Paul McCartney) are still very much alive. There remains a lot to appreciate here. The scenes where Astrid—with her trusty Rolleicord camera—arranges her famous outdoor photo shoot with the boys is a revelation on the humble origins of what became the band’s legendarily photogenic aura. Also, the narrative does (lightly) chart the progress of the Beatles as they ascend from the dingier Reeperbahn dives to more high-profile clubs and make their first record, backing up singer Tony Sheridan. Towards the end, there are several image-only pages (which include wordless speech balloons) that convey Sutcliffe’s terrible fate with much eloquence.

I do hope that rock and roll graphic novels, produced with the sensitivity that Bellstorf displays here, do become more of a thing. The pop stories of our musical heroes have been hashed over in various media formats over the years, but graphic novels, with their combination of fiction writing’s interiority and cinema’s visceral immediacy, seems like a great forum in which to re-experience pop history.

But apparently this may be a case of be careful what you wish for. Yesterday I read a news item announcing the imminent arrival (in late March) of a 464-page book called “Tales of the Smiths: A Graphic Biography.” That’s a whole lotta Morrissey! I think I have the early front-runner for the Feel-Bad Book of the Year award…

On a more positive note, you can check out Klaus Voormann’s own coffee-table sized graphic novel, “Birth of an Icon: Revolver 50,” based around the making of his totemic Beatles’ album cover in 1966.

The T.A.M.I. Show. Don’t Look Back. Monterey Pop. Woodstock. Gimme Shelter. Let it Be.
The Last Waltz. The Kids Are Alright. Stop Making Sense. Standing in the Shadows of Motown.
The Filth and the Fury. Searching for Sugar Man. Twenty Feet From Stardom

Over the last half century, music documentaries like these have provided us with a priceless moving-image history of rock ‘n’ roll. My book “Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey” is a first-of-its-kind anthology of the rockumentary genre, viewing pop music’s timeline through the prism of non-fiction film. Since its earliest days, the look of rock ‘n’ roll has been integral to its overall appeal.

This book reviews over 150 films from 1964 to 2014 in anthology form. It starts with a ground level look at the Beatles’ world-changing first visit to America and comes full circle fifty years later with “Good Ol’ Freda,” where the Fab Four’s secretary looks back through the years as both a fan and an insider. In between, readers will find many films to re-experience or discover for the first time.

From Craig Breaden, contributing writer for the Progarchy site:Rick Ouellette’s “Rock Docs” is right at home in my rock reference collection, sitting next to my old Trouser Press Record Guide and my Rolling Stone Interview books. It’s the kind of read you can dip into piecemeal, as the mood strikes, and Ouellette’s amiable style will keep you coming back. Nicely done, and a really fun read!

And speaking of Prog, order “Rock Docs” between now and the end of February and I’ll throw in a free copy of my new (and first) comic book, “I Was a Teenage Proghead” with illustrations by Brian Bicknell.

Wilsontown High School, 1974
Travel back to a time when the hair was long and so were the musical attention spans. That fall the mellow vibe of Wilsontown High gets disrupted by a mysterious rich-kid bully. But he makes a “sad” miscalculation when he focuses his grievances on Sean and Paul—two know-it-all aspiring rock critics—and their two new friends: clairvoyant Jane Klancy and kung-fu enthusiast April Underwood. Things are going to get personal in a hurry…

If you are interested in purchasing “Rock Docs” and getting the comic book in the bargain, please leave a message below as I now sell the book directly for these promotions. You can also click on the link below for my author page at BookLocker.com. The link also has a click-through where you can view a 30-page excerpt.
Thanks, Rick

Across much of rock history’s last half-century, the double album has stood for a certain stakes-raising ambition and creative envelope-pushing, with artists asking fans for a little more of their attention and a little more of their disposable income. Among the sample titles pictured in this post, you’ll find some of rock’s most revered and, in a few cases, most reviled recordings. What do these titles have in common other than they were originally released as two-disc packages? In some ways, not a lot. As one might expect, the musical styles and subject matter are as varied as the far-flung pop universe itself. Delve into these records and soon enough you’ll come across overtures, artful sidelong suites, titanic instrumental jams and concept works based on socio-political and fantasy themes. There will be room for genre dabbling, sound collages, acoustic interludes and maybe even space left over to let the bass player sing a number.

How did these outsized albums come about? After all, as conventional wisdom would have it, rock ‘n’ roll is nothing if not concise. The early songs of Chuck Berry, Elvis, Buddy Holly et al rarely exceeded four minutes and were often closer to two. And that framework—the short, concentrated blasts of rebellion and celebration, dance and romance—are still often held up as the ideal of the art form. But art forms are rarely or ever immutable. They evolve and expand often to the point of earning a backlash, circling back closer to their original incarnation. Rock music is no exception to the rule. In its initial era of greatness, the 45 RPM single was the coin of the realm for rock ‘n’ roll’s pioneers. The latest smash by Bill Haley or Jerry Lee Lewis was played on a jukebox at the drop of a dime or heard on the AM radios of the big cruising sedans of the 1950s.
Long-playing records existed back then more as a vehicle for the most successful acts, pooling together a few hits and adding on some cover versions or dashed-off filler material.

In the wake of the Beatles’ worldwide success in 1964, rock music evolved into an artist-driven force to be reckoned with. Along with the Fab Four, bigger artists like the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys and Bob Dylan were able to assert more creative control. Soon, establishment-friendly fare like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” wasn’t cutting it any longer, especially as the Sixties became a more turbulent, crucial decade. Moreover, people like Dylan had multiple influences to begin with and it was just a matter of time before they all came to the fore. Sure, ol’ Zimmy was inspired by the great country artists like Hank Williams he’d pick up on his radio during lonely nights in northern Minnesota. But alongside them—and rock ‘n’ rollers like Little Richard that he would soon emulate in his high school band—there was a Beatnik strain as well.

Many of early baby boomers who came of age in the Sixties looked back in admiration at the literary rebels of the previous generation (Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac) as a touchstone to a new subversive epoch. For the Beats, the chosen music was jazz, an exploratory long-form medium that connected with a crowd searching for something more cosmic than what the Eisenhower years generally had to offer. The combined effect of a seized artistic freedom and a tempestuous era eventually led to ambitious rock music and it was Bob Dylan on the leading edge. His seminal Blonde on Blonde is widely regarded as rock’s first double album, ranging from ruminative balladry to fierce and free-associating blues rock; it set a very high bar for all four-sided efforts to follow. The officially-given release date of Blonde on Blonde was May 16, 1966 although there are claims that it didn’t show up (at least on the charts) until that July. In the month in between, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention debuted with a two-record set aptly called Freak Out! This anarchic blend of protest rock, Dadaist vocalizing, revisionist doo-wop and avant-garde aural collage was an early indicator as to how far off the margins counterculture music could go in the decade to follow.

By the end of the Sixties, the hippie masses had been treated to the Beatles’ White Album, the Who’s Tommy and Electric Ladyland by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, among others. We were off to the races. In a few days, I’ll start with a review of Blonde on Blonde that will, like other posts in this series, look at the album in view of how it pushed out at the boundaries of rock music (or at least tried to).

Throughout 2018, I’ll post a new one every 10-14 days, jumping around in time and genre. This is for a once a maybe future book project and I have about a third of it written. If you have any suggestions, let me know in the comments section (you can use the album cover images here as a jumping off point). Note that I have made double live albums and best-of compilations ineligible for this series, though half-studio/half-live records will be included.
–Rick Ouellette

In Part Two: When September rolls around, our four heroes become quick friends. But the hazy tranquility of post-hippie high school life in Wilsontown is shattered when they have to deal with an early-onset case of Trumpism. April decides she has to take matters into her own hands. This time it’s personal….

Part Two will appear in the full 24-page printed comic. Please note that anyone out there who has purchased my book “Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey” and would be willing to write a short Amazon review of it, will get sent a free copy. (Just let me know when it’s up). If you would like to purchase “Rock Docs” directly through me, I will throw in a copy of the comic as well. Just $18 for both and that includes shipping within the U.S. If interested, leave a comment or email me.

Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll
By Peter Bebergal—2014—229 pages—J. Tarcher/Penguin Books

What would you think of first if someone asked you to give a quick example of the union between pop music and the occult? Maybe you’d mention a choice Black Sabbath track like “Children of the Grave,” or recollect an Alice Cooper stage show from high school days or perhaps a death metal show for those of younger vintage. Some of you would quickly counter that naming one example is merely scratching the surface. In his new book Season of the Witch, author Peter Bebergal makes the case that the ”occult imagination” is in fact central to the appeal and success of rock music, and may be its very lifeblood.

Ozzy says: “I got your occult imagination, right here!”

Early chapters of this intriguing and informative (if occasionally meandering) book traces this influence back to European and American artistic/spiritual movements while also telescoping back to the pre-slave-trade African traditions that would give birth to gospel music and the blues. Bebergal very ably dissects the surprisingly close connections between the sacred and profane that passed into the culture of the American South. “Rock’s origins are in the blues and folk,” he writes, “forms of music deeply ingrained with Christian traditions and values, but whose own roots grew in the soil where other gods were worshipped.” Although he notes that modern Christianity tried to “seal off” these more ancient impulses, they always remained to some extent (speaking in tongues, ring shouts) and this ambivalence shows in the life and careers of early rock ‘n’ roll pioneers like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. But the influence of the occult (defined broadly as supernatural beliefs and the pursuit of esoteric knowledge) with its rebellious and unorthodox nature was a natural when this new music came along with the ascendance of youth culture in the Fifties.

Arthur Brown, after his god-of-hellfire days, formed Kingdom Come, seen here waiting on some hobgoblin action.

In fact, as Bebergal points out, early efforts by parents and ministers to stymie this new music likely backfired in the worst way. “Intentions to stop the music in its tracks instead started a conflagration that has never gone out,” he writes and indeed the relative innocence of those early years was superseded by the influence of the Beat writers, Aleister Crowley, Eastern spiritualism, and of course LSD. Through the likes of Pink Floyd, the Stones, the Beatles (in the post-“Revolver”/Maharishi era), Arthur Brown, Hawkwind, David Bowie, Sabbath, Sun Ra, Yes, Led Zeppelin and many others, “rock created a mythos around itself suggesting it was somehow heir to secret wisdom.” All of these case histories are given a good airing out without (usually) getting lurid. The author is clear-eyed about his subject, noting the negative side effects (drug abuse, cults) but also endorsing its role in affecting personal empowerment and acting as a counterweight to lockstep establishment thinking.

Madonna at the 2012 Super Bowl halftime show, with her carefully-coded performance announcing the imminent takeover of the world by the Illuminati. And here’s me thinking it was just egomania.

Season of the Witch is a fine addition to the ever-growing canon of rock literature. Granted it’s not perfect: with so many artists to cover, some of Bebergals’ insights may sound a bit second-hand to devotees of a particular group. A few things are just wrong (Alice Cooper was not the name of an accused witch burned in 17th century Salem; besides they were hanged). But he does wrap it up nicely, moving the timeline up into this century, noting Jay-Z’s free-associating use of Freemason imagery in his videos and Madonna’s over-the-top halftime show at the 2012 Super Bowl, replete with pompous pageantry based on the kind Egyptian and Kabbalistic iconography that sent New World Order conspiracy theorists into a tizzy. But let’s put aside those vain one-per centers and remember that the magic in music can inspire people to a higher spiritual plain that will benefit us all in the end.

(If you like Books That Rock, please check out my tome Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey by clicking on the link below. A 30-page is available there, so try you can try-before-you-buy. Thanks, Rick Ouellette)http://booklocker.com/books/8905.html

“Everybody wants to rule the world,” British New-Wavers Tears for Fears slyly proclaimed on their 1985 hit of the same name. Of course, there is irony there: everyone knows that most people would be happy with just a fair shake in life. But even that modest expectation seems naïve today when so many “leaders,” whether in politics or business (and really, what’s the difference?) seem more intent on dominating than on leading.

“So glad we’ve almost made it/So sad they had to fade it” (Everybody Wants to Rule the World, written by Roland Orzabal, Ian Stanley and Chris Hughes)

Never mind for a minute the actions of a certain U.S. president whose dingbat megalomania and all-consuming need for loyalty and adoration seems to bubble up from a bottomless pool of self-hatred that is dreadful to contemplate. So yeah, never mind it. But what about those global top dogs of high-tech, so admired for their paradigm-shifting innovations? Which brings us (well, me) to Amazon. Millions, if not billions, love the we-have-everything-quickly customer-centric giant. So in the bargain for this prevelant need for ever-optimized consumer convenience, Amazon can impunitively send traditional brick-and-mortar businesses into tailspin, evade taxes, treat their warehouse employees like indentured servants subject to clinically-tested psychological pressures (making for smashing magazine exposes) and shortchange content providers big and small. Especially small. There’s no irony when CEO Jeff Bezos wracks up these headlines:

How Jeff Bezos is Hurtling Towards World Domination (Newsweek)
A Quest to Rule the Universe? Bezos Expands His Rocket Plans (L.A. Times)
Or simply,
Jeff Bezos Wants to Rule the World (take your pick across the Internet)

The content provider issue is the one that involves me, though there are hundreds if not thousands of other indie authors with similar gripes. As I put my finishing touches on my second book, “Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey” last fall, I hinted in my postscript of the potential of rock music, especially through its visual recorded history, to keep the spirit of youthful idealism alive one’s whole life through.

So off goes my tenderly nurtured labor of love off to BookLocker.com, the print-on-demand publisher I had used on my first tome, “Documentary 101: A Viewer’s Guide to Non-Fiction Film.” I try to steer would-be buyers of the book to them, a smallish and trustworthy mom-and-pop business that strikes the right balance between consumer and content provider, treating both fairly. It spreads the wealth around and puts a little extra something back in the pocket of the writer trying to make back their up front investment.

But let’s face it, Amazon is what people understand nowadays and many people will just go through them by force of habit. Imagine the dismay, when just a couple of months after being released the Bezos gang start listing my book as “Temporarily Out of Print.” Since “Rock Docs” is a print-on-demand title, this is categorically impossible.

So after a slew of emails between myself and the “Help” people at Amazon’s Author Central, I was told, with the same unnerving passive-aggressive certitude used by their CEO, that it was because they had no copies in their warehouse (and could we send them some at no charge), that the involvement of a third party slows down their preciously pursued turnaround times (even though BookLocker uses Ingram for printing, a reliably fast printer who even use Amazon shipping labels) and by the way, wouldn’t I be happier using their self-publishing services? Well, obviously I gave them a definitive No to that question, but while BookLocker gallantly play David vs. Goliath (they’ve already won one settlement against Amazon) my book take a predictable plunge in the latter’s ranking, down into the millions, a predictable predicament when the book is falsely claimed to be out of stock.

Before I go any further let me get to my main point (or plug). If you’re interested in my book (and if you’ve been visiting this blog you are probably in the target audience anyway) go visit BookLocker.com at the link below or a non-Amazon online bookseller, like Barnes & Noble at bn.com. Note that there’s a 30-page excerpt available at my BookLocker author page

Let’s spread the wealth while there’s still some left to spread. The wife-husband team that operates BookLocker are a diligent home-schooling couple who have built a nice business for themselves. I can’ but help to think that Jeff Bezos would rather have them slaving away at one of his draconian warehouses than willingly let somebody dare be in the same business as him. Maybe he’ll prove me otherwise someday, rather than making collateral damage of hundreds if not thousands of indie writers.

“Help me make the most of Freedom and of pleasure/Nothing ever lasts forever,
Everybody wants to rule the world.”

Of course, this whole thing is indicative of a larger societal problem in the upper strata: the “we can do it, so we will” mentality, where no advantage will be left untaken and no admission of fallibility or wrongdoing is possible, ever. You know, I never had a lot of time for the therapy-session pop of Tears for Fears back in the Eighties. But I did always like this song and its image of a couple “holding hands while the walls come tumbling down” in the face of a callous world. With the passage of time it’s gotten only better and I found this recent performance pretty inspiring. Ironically in terms of this post, it was produced by Spotify, infamous for compensating musical artists micro-pennies on the dollar on their streaming service. Nevertheless, great job, guys—I only hope you got paid for it.

Oh, to have grown up in the Seventies. That’s not a hypothetical, because I did. To me, the later baby boomers got a bit of the best of both worlds, musically speaking. At the start of the decade, we had just graduated from the kids table and many of the best Sixties performers still going strong, while the glorious excesses of newer rock gods like Led Zeppelin were on the vanguard. If the music scene seemed to be a bit on the wane by the middle Seventies, that was OK. By the time we were off to college or moved away to the big city a couple of years later, the punk and indie-rock movement was just taking hold. In my new book, Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey, I examine this ever-shifting and regenerating rock history through how it was captured in concert and documentary films. For a 30-page excerpt and info on how to purchase, please click on the link below. Also available on Amazon and from other online book retailers.http://booklocker.com/books/8905.html

From The Song Remains the Same (1976)

Jimmy Page’s fantasy sequence, the most conceptually fine-tuned of the four, arguably holds up the best. It comes during the twenty-eight-minute, nuclear-option version of “Dazed and Confused,” the fame-making psycho blues from the band’s first album. The concert incarnation of “Dazed” featured several sections not heard on the studio original, most notably the unearthly interlude when Page took a violin bow to his guitar, fed it through an echoplex, and played to the crowd like a modern-day Merlin. Then the scene switches to his property near Scotland’s Loch Ness where he had recently (and un-coincidentally) bought the former home of occult figurehead Aleister Crowley. The atmospherics are just right (full moon and a light snowfall) as Page climbs an escarpment in a near re-creation of the “Stairway to Heaven”-suggestive gatefold illustration in Led Zeppelin IV. At the top he meets the same Tarot-deck hermit but it’s actually himself in advanced old age. In a special effects shot that always got a cheer from theater audiences, the hermit’s face then morphs back in time, eventually revealing Page in his Yardbird days, as a schoolboy and as a young tot—suggesting, as Page said in a 2007 magazine interview, that enlightenment “can be achieved at any time in a man’s life.” To top it off, the hermit’s staff turns into a multi-hued light saber.

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From Soul to Soul (1973)

Ten years after becoming the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence in the post-colonial era, Ghana celebrated in part by staging a huge cross-cultural concert event. Featuring local performers and an array of mostly black soul, pop and jazz musicians from the U.S., this was an age before a word like “multiculturalism” was part of everybody’s vocabulary and there is a real sense of discovery here on both sides, though the solidarity is touched with befuddlement at times. The biggest star to the 100,000 fans is clearly Wilson Pickett, whose bravura performance inspires a giant mosh pit.

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From The Kids are Alright (1979)

Despite the Who’s tendency to tomfoolery in interviews, in the end all you need is in the music. Jeff Stein made his best directorial move in cajoling a reluctant band to go back on stage at Shepperton Studios and give him one definitive take of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” for the record (there was an invited audience of about 500). Townshend’s eight-minute manifesto of self-determination in an unreliable world is one of rock’s great galvanizing classics and the fired-up band pulls out all the stops. The years of hard living were catching up to Moon (as they would with John Entwistle in 2002) and he showed up for rehearsals overweight and out of practice. But coming out of the song’s electronic keyboard interlude (with its 2001-inspired laser light display) Keith nails the thunderous drum cadenza and Roger lets rip rock’s most histrionic “Yeah!!” while Pete leaps clear across the stage, landing in a knee slide straight at the camera. Yes, rock ‘n’ roll does matter despite the Who’s self-conscious protestations.

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From The Filth and the Fury (2000)

Julien Temple started filming the Sex Pistols from their earliest gigs in 1976. He starts The Filth and the Fury with a bracing montage of British social upheaval, discontent and rioting in the mid-70s that left the country ripe for the Pistols’ confrontational and chaotic revolt. It is the ex-Rotten John Lydon who gets off a lot of the best lines in the contemporary interviews, during which group members are shown individually and in silhouette, as if in witness protection, still somewhat menacing. Lydon recalls his life and times as a “damn ugly fuck-up” who emerged “brain-wiped” after being in a coma for a year with a bad case of boyhood meningitis, then realizing at age fourteen he had only a short time left to escape a third-rate fate. By the end, Lydon tears up at the memory of the ill-fated Sid Vicious, admitting to his inability to pull his childhood friend off the dismal path to junkiedom—it affords Sid a humanity rarely allowed to him by both detractors and idolizers.

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From Rust Never Sleeps (1979)

Never mind the Jawas: an open-ended life quest, in the end, is concept enough for Rust Never Sleeps. Never as overtly confessional as some of his singer-songwriter contemporaries, Young connects with his fan base using a more loose-ends type of questing poetry. It’s the type that is easy to project oneself into even when the language gets elaborate and impressionistic. Is the Dylanesque “Thrasher” a beguiling manifesto of creative and personal independence or a thinly-disguised dissing of his former and future colleagues named Crosby, Stills and Nash? Of course, it could be both and more, and the imagery (“Where the eagle glides ascending, there’s an ancient river bending/Down the timeless gorge of changes, where sleeplessness awaits”) of escape and discovery are universal. Rust Never Sleeps, both the film and his then-current album of the same name can be seen as an end-of-decade mission statement.

Rock festivals, especially those in the golden era of the late 60s and early 70s, are the source for some of the best filmed footage in pop music history. The primary reason for this is pretty obvious. The parade of musical talent for 1967’s Monterey Pop, 1969’s Woodstock and 1970’s Isle of Wight festivals is awe-inspiring, especially in retrospect: high-water marks of a genius era. But they are also great sociological snapshots of their time period and often the audience members are just as entertaining as the performers!

Below are five excerpts from my new book Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey about this important rockumentary sub-genre, with accompanying vdeo clips. For a 30-page excerpt and purchase information about this book, please click on the link below or on the book cover image in the right-hand column. Thanks, Rick Ouellette

From the review of Monterey Pop (released 1968, directed by D.A. Pennebaker)

There’s hardly a baby-boomer to be found who doesn’t know something of the quartet of near-mythic Monterey Moments: the Who’s pre-punk working class anthem “My Generation” ending in a cacophony of smashed equipment, Janis Joplin’s no-holds-barred belting on the bluesy “Ball and Chain,” soul singer Otis Redding’s electrifying set winning over the “love crowd” in a career peak just six months before dying in a plane crash, and, of course, Jimi Hendrix’s epic eroticisation of the hitherto harmless ditty “Wild Thing.” The Seattle native had gone to England to make his name, and here reintroduced himself to America with a stunning display of six-string mastery that culminated with the famous fiery sacrifice of his instrument.

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From Woodstock (released 1970, directed by Michael Wadleigh)

The logistical and crowd scenes that pop up after every three or four songs are every bit as interesting, especially the bravura ten-minute sequence depicting the famous Sunday thunderstorm. It drenched a crowd that had just been galvanized by Cocker’s dramatic recasting of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends,” and thrust the stage crew into the role of reassuring the sea of humanity while simultaneously fretting over the fate of their vulnerable light towers and staving off the possibility of electrocution. When the crowd comes out the other end of this mud-covered crucible with their good spirits intact, their reputation is made.

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From Message to Love: The isle of Wight Festival (released 1997, directed by Murray Lerner)

With six hundred thousand rock fans ferrying over from mainland England in August 1970, the third annual Isle of Wight Festival was one of the biggest concert events in history. Unfortunately, the five-day festival turned out to be a financial failure, and the commissioned footage from director Murray Lerner’s crew did not emerge as a feature film until a quarter of a century later. Nevertheless, Message to Love is a documentary that deserves to sit up on the same mantle as Monterey Pop and Gimme Shelter. It contains a wealth of great musical moments; especially notable are clips of both Jimi Hendrix and the Doors’ Jim Morrison shortly before their deaths as well as footage of the Who at the very apex of their career. It is also a clear-eyed view of an event that was supposed to be an English Woodstock but instead descended into utter chaos as the Aquarian hippie ideal knocked heads with the emerging notion that rock music was ripe for mass-market exploitation.

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From Wattstax (released 1973, directed by Mel Stuart)

Every music festival film has at least one classic show-stealer and in Wattstax that moment arrives when Rufus Thomas, the perennial Memphis favorite duly advertised as “The Prince of Dance” on the L.A. Coliseum scoreboard, takes the stage. Appearing for all the world to see in a hot pink suit with short pants and white go-go boots, he works up the crowd to such a degree with “The Breakdown” that when he then instructs them to “Do the Funky Chicken,” thousands of dancers storm the football field to oblige him.

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From Glastonbury (released 2006, directed by Julien Temple)

The Glastonbury Festival in rural England holds a rather unique place in the annals of rock as being the one outdoor event started in the Woodstock era that has continued—despite a few missed years—straight into the present day, adapting and growing exponentially but still retaining much of its counterculture spirit. Rockumentary master Julien Temple has funneled this considerable history into a vibrant, if occasionally jumbled, film record of just under two and a half hours. He benefits from the availability of vintage early footage (some of it from 1971’s Glastonbury Fayre) and adds in his accounting of the modern festival (Temple shot there from 2002-05) with much attention to the event’s evolving sociology and an extensive sampling of live performances clips. What is just as memorable as this multi-generational musical cornucopia is the thirty-ring post-hippie circus that accompanies it: a freewheeling pagan arts fair and anti-establishment concave that equals or even overshadows what’s on the main stage.

My new book Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey traces rock history through its depiction in documentary film. Rock ‘n’ roll has always been a strong visual medium and movies based around it, like “Jailhouse Rock” and “Rock Around the Clock” and others with the “R” word in its title, were all the rage by as early as 1956. But it wasn’t really until 1964, with the Beatles’ seismic impact on the entertainment world, that this music started being committed to film by documentary producers. In the first of five themed samplers from the book, I look at those early days, accompanied by related video clips.

If you are interested in purchasing Rock Docs, please click on the image of the book cover in the right-hand column,it links to my BookLocker author page which contains a longer excerpt. Also, feel free to join my “Rock Docs” Facebook page. Thanks, Rick

It was only ten weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy. With the pall of national tragedy still in the air that winter, filmmakers Albert and David Maysles got a call from Granada Television in England saying a musical group named the Beatles were arriving in New York in a couple of hours and asking if they would mind heading down and maybe getting some footage? They arrived just in time to record that famous moment when John, Paul, George, and Ringo hesitated a moment at the top of the steps while leaving their plane, realizing that the hordes of people lining the balcony of the terminal were there for them and not some head of state as they first thought. And just like that, the Maysles brothers found themselves in the middle of one of the twentieth century’s defining cultural moments.

Produced by their manager Andrew Loog Oldham reportedly to get his rising stars used to the idea of film, Charlie is My Darling was the first documentary about the Rolling Stones. Back in the screaming-teenager epoch of the mid-1960s, the boys are whisked off to Ireland for a quickie tour hastily arranged to capitalize on the recent smash hit “Satisfaction.” It’s a bit of a revelation here to see the Stones in the first flush of their youthful success. They were already well known for the riotous audiences they attracted and by the end of the third number in Dublin the stage invasion is in full stride, memorably captured by Peter Whitehead’s in-the-wings camera.

It’s been described as the ultimate Battle of the Bands—James Brown and the Famous Flames vs. the Rolling Stones. It definitely helped that both still had a lot to gain at this point in their careers. Brown coveted the crossover audience that so far eluded him and the Stones were fighting to crack into the American pop marketplace. Though Brown wanted to close the show the producers opted for a British Invasion finale. It hardly mattered: The Flames’ eighteen-minute set is justly hailed as one of the more thrilling concert sequences of the rock era. This in turn made the Stones step up their game and during all this the audience makes the final transformation from excitable to certifiable.

Although blues great Son House has been seen doing an electrified set with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (and going over well with it) it’s another story when Bob Dylan plugs in with the same guys and launches into “Maggie’s Farm,” complete with a searing guitar solo by Mike Bloomfield. The reception is actually mixed, in contrast to the legend of him being booed off the stage. He is coaxed into coming back with his acoustic guitar, but the die has been cast. The authenticity claimed by folk fans earlier mentioned has shaded into defensive orthodoxy and Dylan, seeing the similarly gifted Beatles already becoming worldwide icons, was off to chart a new course.

From Festival! (Murray Lerner’s compilation film of the Newport Folk festival 1963-66)

Cream was one of the first media-ordained supergroups and their final show, at London’s Royal Albert Hall in November ’68, was one of rock’s first self-consciously grand events. There was an imperative to capture the talented but fractious band on film before the split. The non-concert segments have an oddly defensive tone, with the power trio’s music having to be compared to the “traditional arts” by the BBC narrator. Back then, the thought of a longhair band and their scruffy fans taking over the august Albert Hall was probably still a bit controversial. Even if they had “almost single-handedly given rock an authority which only the deaf cannot acknowledge”!!

The T.A.M.I. Show. Don’t Look Back. Monterey Pop. Woodstock. Gimme Shelter. Let it Be.
The Last Waltz. The Kids Are Alright. Stop Making Sense. Standing in the Shadows of Motown.
The Filth and the Fury. Searching for Sugar Man. Twenty Feet From Stardom.

Over the last half century, music documentaries like these have provided us with a priceless moving-image history of rock ‘n’ roll. My just-released book “Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey” is a first-of-its-kind anthology of the rockumentary genre, viewing pop music’s timeline through the prism of non-fiction film. Since its earliest days, the look of rock ‘n’ roll has been integral to its overall appeal. Up and down the hallways of pop history there is always something interesting to see as well as to hear.

This book reviews over 150 films–actually closer to 170 but that number didn’t seem right on a book cover. It starts with a ground level look at the Beatles’ world-changing first visit to America and comes full circle fifty years later with “Good Ol’ Freda,” where the Fab Four’s secretary looks back through the years as both a fan and an insider. In between, readers will find many films to re-experience or discover for the first time.

The anthology format consists of 50 feature-length reviews and paragraph-length pieces on the remaining 100+ titles. In the coming weeks, I will be posting selected clips from the book. If you are interested in purchasing the book, please click on the link below for my author page at BookLocker.com. The link also has a click-through where you can view a 30-page excerpt.